Better Flour, Better Bread. Fresh Flour with Mockmill

Head on over to WolfgangMock.com to get $80 off the Mockmill with our discount code, pinkninjablogger. Discover how easy it is to make you own fresh flour.

The industrial revolution has brought us some real miracles; Railroads, cars, dishwashers and washing machines, Velcro, the pet rock. You name it in modern society; the industrial revolution is probably responsible. But these days part of me is thinking maybe some things shouldn’t come from a factory. Things like tomatoes and chicken and beef and cumquats and flour and Twinkies. Ok, maybe Twinkies deserve to come from a factory.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a total hippie. I’m all for modern society and modern conveniences, like air conditioning, but as I get older and watch my child grow, I can’t help but wonder about getting back to a little more natural way of doing some things. Like growing vegetables in a garden, getting real beef from a local farmer instead of packaged in the grocery store and grinding my own flour.

So yes, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I am writing today about grinding flour at home. You know why? Because it’s good for you, because it tastes good and because it’s so freaking easy it is disgusting. This isn’t the 1700’s where you had to find a water source, then build a mill, then grind some grain and then watch your mill blow up. Did you know flour mills used to blow up on a regular basis? Apparently grain dust is very combustible.

But I digress. Since we are now in the 21^st century, grinding your own flour is reeeeally easy. To start off with you need some basic know-how. I got this from Flour Power, a very interesting book by Maleeta Basey about home milling. Yeah, I’m totally not kidding, it was interesting. When there is a chapter titled “The Pigs eat better than we do” you know there is going to be something interesting going on.

You also need some grain to mill. This might take some work. Whole grain does not appear to be something carried at most grocery stores, even ones with an organic section. I called around and found a very helpful gentleman named Dennis at my local Whole Foods Market who informed me that they have several types of whole grains suitable for home milling, and that if they didn’t have it, he would order it for me. I picked up several pounds of Red Spring Wheat, Red Winter Wheat and Spelt. These are all types of grains described in the book suitable for a first-timer. You need to go easy your first time after all. (Hmm, the wife just asked if I looked on Amazon, I guess that could have been an option … *facepalm*)

Then you need a grain mill that will fit a stand mixer. In my case it was a Mockmill to go on my trusty KitchenAid stand mixer. But most stand mixers these days come with an interchangeable attachment thingy, and the Mockmill works with all of them.

So you know how easy it is to mill your own flour? It is taking more effort to write these words and tell you about it than it was to actually do it. Once you have your mill hooked in (to the standard attachment doohickey place on your mixer), you adjust it to the coarseness you want, turn it on and throw some grain in the hopper. That’s it.

You let your mixer and the mill do all the work. Boom. I literally scooped about two cups of the red spring wheat berries into the hopper, turned it on, and walked away. I was reading a book while the Mockmill did all the hard work. When it finished grinding I took a look at my handiwork. You know what I had? Several cups of fresh whole wheat flour. You know how long the whole process took? About 10 minutes. You know what I did with it?

What else? I made mini pizzas!!

I went online and found a recipe for pizza and it called for yeast. I should have known. So I headed to the grocery store and while I was wandering down the baking aisle looking for yeast amongst all the bleached white flour, I saw pizza yeast! How perfect. So rather than follow the long recipe I found online, I used the super simple recipe on the yeast package, which just needed flour, yeast, a little sugar and salt, some oil and warm water. Throw it all in the mixer to mix it up for a couple minutes. Switch in the dough hook to do the kneading and boom, pizza crust. I portioned it up into four dough balls so we could make mini pizzas for the family.

I’ll be perfectly honest. I used to make pizza crust all the time in my high school days. From a box, just add water. This was just as easy and tasted better. I used the exact same amount of freshly milled flour that the recipe called for. I will warn you though, the recipe calls for putting the pizza on the lowest rack in the oven. The bottoms of the first batch of pizza crust burned when I did that; do it on the middle rack.

So now we get to the really big important point of this whole journey. Why go to all this trouble?

First off, it really wasn’t all that much trouble. Seriously. I like to over complicate things so I did the reading and the research etc. But the reality is I could have skipped any research, just gone to the store, purchased a couple pounds of whole grain wheat (a whopping $2 investment), come home and milled and made fresh pizza. It’s that easy.

Second, it tastes awesome. Have you ever smelled bleached white flour? It smells like, flour. Have you ever smelled fresh whole grain flour milled at home? I have. It smells fresh and fragrant. You know why? Because it hasn’t been processed to within an inch of its life. All the healthy parts of the wheat (the germ and the bran and the fiber) that are removed by modern processing are preserved. And consequently all the parts of the wheat that actually impart flavor are preserved.

My next effort is going to be bread. Our bread machine doesn’t get used often enough and I can’t wait to try out my fresh flour in the bread machine. You owe it to yourself to get one soon.

So here’s the deal, Wolfgang Mock, the maker of the Mockmill has a great deal on their stand mixer flour mill attachment along with several pounds of grain ready to mill and a copy of Flour Power.

Head on over to wolfgangmock.com now and use our discount code, pinkninjablogger, to get $80 off your Mockmill.

Disclaimer: I have been compensated for this post by product or payment in exchange for my unbiased thoughts. And I have to be honest; my unbiased thoughts are that this thing is pretty awesome. Please note, this post may contain affiliate links.